was paid to Mr Hawes for his play; he died before 1530, when Thomas Field, in his Conversation between a Lover and a Jay, wrote "Yong Steven Hawse, whose soule God pardon, Treated of love so clerkly and well".
Lewis, have treated Hawes dismissively: "faculty was what he lacked; there was more and better poetry in him than he could express", referring to his "broken-backed metre and dull excursions into the seven liberal arts".
[2] But his metre is not consistently broken-backed: from time to time (though not very often) one encounters lines that would not have disgraced either Chaucer before him or Spenser after him: "The fragraunt fumes / dyde well encense out // All mysty vapours / of perturbacyon // ore lyker was / her habytacyon // Vnto a place / whiche is celestyall // Than to a terrayne / mancyon fatall" or "By her propre hande / soft as ony sylke // With due obeysaunce / I dyde her than take // Her skynne was whyte / as whalles bone or mylke // My thoughtes was rauysshed / I myght not aslake // My brennynge hert / she the fyre dyde make // These daunces truely / musyke hath me tought // To lute or daunce / but it auayled nought" and so on, where, so long as one pronounces at least some of the final e's, the metre seems to work quite well.
Novelist Hilda Lamb made Hawes a character of her novel The Willing Heart published in 1958, where he is fictionally portrayed as an illegitimate son of King Richard III's.
His major work is The History of Graunde Amour and la Bel Pucel, conteining the knowledge of the Seven Sciences and the Course of Mans Life in this Worlde or The Passetyme of Pleasure, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1509, but finished three years earlier.
The admonition of Death brings Contrition and Conscience, and it is only when Remembraunce has delivered an epitaph chiefly dealing with the Seven Deadly Sins, and Fame has enrolled Graunde Amours name with the knights of antiquity, that we are allowed to part with the hero.